As Mike Arrington noted recently, a new class of startups is emerging that is addressing a new space in digital lifestyle aggregation. It’s about winning people for years to come, helping them assemble their memories (blogs, images, video), and, bluntly, locking them in through the amount of sheer time they’ve invested.
In the US, Our Story (which has raised $6 million in venture capital), Story Of My Life, dandelife and My Family are the ones to watch.
Here in the UK Rememble, which is having a refresh today, is also a time-line based DLA (Digital Lifestyle Aggregator). In this case you store your digital bits and pieces – texts, emails, pics, videos, audio clips – on a timeline that you can share with friends as much or as little as you like.
You can upload from inside the site or email stuff to the site. You can create group timelines and generate your own communities. Additionally you can import from your Twitter and Flickr streams. It also supports SMS and MMS uploads in some countries. The upshot is that Rememble builds a timeline for all of these items.
Developed by Gavin O’Carroll with a seed grant from the UK-based NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) Rememble has a great, fun interface and makes the process of ‘DLA-ing’ yourself quite fun.
In the UK it’s going up against Miomi, and larger venture backed by Brightstation Ventures.
Created by three German developers – Richard Schreiber, Thomas Whitfield and Karlheinz Toni – it is headed up by CEO Jonny Crowe.
Miomi has a fun giant timeline which is a symphony in Ajax ( I think?). It’s also pulling in historical material form Encarta and Wikipedia, and some news sources. One of its core focuses is putting oral history online. Revenues are designed to come from small, discreet advertising.
It’s early days for these kinds of DLAs in the UK, where many people are only just getting their heads around uploading pictures to Facebook. But if they can communicate their benefits – creating a sort of living diary – well enough these sites should have a good future.
And hopefully there are bigger ecosystems to be built around this, such as being able to hook your DLA into the API of a book or photo printer, and literally create your very own “This is your life”.